Writing the Otherness of Nature: Chinese Misty Poetry and the Alternative Modernist Practice

Nature always serves as a form of resistance to communist state discourse in contemporary Chinese arts and literature. This paper examines how Misty Poetry constructs a new form of subjectivity through its historical depiction of the natural world. The works of Yang Lian are closely read in terms of their different treatment of natural objects in comparison to the Western modernist poetics. With a strong root-searching inclination, Yang's poems attempt to find a way back to the untamed rudeness of nature that can revitalize the national culture. However, natural being is never a positive entity but can only be retroactively constructed by the searching subject itself.